The right’s looming war over AI

As the Trump administration enters its ninth month, the White House’s list of wins keeps piling up—but so does the number of cracks in its coalition. One of them—the rift between the so-called “tech right” and the Republican Party’s traditional social conservative base—has widened into a gaping chasm under the pressure of artificial intelligence.

The chasm was on full display earlier this month as parallel dramas played out at the White House and the Westin Downtown DC just a few blocks away. At the Rose Garden, two dozen tech leaders, representing the richest companies in history, gathered for a private dinner with the president, seeking to outdo one another in flattery. “Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president. It’s a very refreshing change,” gushed Sam Altman of OpenAI, a sentiment echoed by his rivals at Apple and Google. Seated immediately next to President Trump was Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, until recently a pariah on the right.

Just down the street at the Westin earlier that day, however, Sen. Josh Hawley (who had recently announced a Senate investigation into Meta for sexually grooming children) threw down the gauntlet against the AI companies in his speech at the annual National Conservatism Conference. Warning of the religious zealotry and elite arrogance of Silicon Valley’s transhumanist quest, he declared, “America is a nation founded on the idea of the common man. The American republic is premised on his worth and his liberty. But the transhumanist ideal rejects the common man’s worth. And artificial intelligence threatens the common man’s liberty.”

Hawley was far from the only speaker to denounce transhumanism at the conference, which increasingly serves to define the Overton window for the Right in the age of Trump. Indeed, conference organizer Rachel Bovard announced in NatCon’s opening speech that “Conservatism is about human dignity and human flourishing. By definition, there is no such thing as a transhuman conservatism.” But Hawley’s systematic vivisection of the way the ideology is fueling the AI craze stood out as a high point in the conference. “The problem with the AI ‘revolution’ as it’s currently going,” he warned, “is that it only entrenches the power of the people who are already the most powerful in the world.”

AI seemed to be on everyone’s minds. Steve Bannon denounced it from the mainstage. Two breakout sessions were explicitly dedicated to it. At one of them, Geoffrey Miller, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, called AI developers “betrayers of our species, traitors to our nation, apostates to our faith, and threats to our kids.” At another, “Tech and the Future of the Family,” featuring two prominent child online safety advocates, Michael Toscano and Clare Morell, and two AI experts, Tim Estes and Dean Ball, perspectives were a bit more nuanced, but the overall note was still wary. Ball, lead author of the White House’s AI Action Plan, cautioned that “the bright future I envision is fragile. A tiny error could send us down a deeply wrong path,” while Estes, founder of AngelQ AI, asserted that “true conservatism, in this new age, requires us to stand and defend the human person against this unprecedented threat” posed by the business model of the AI companies.

But there are important distinctions here. One may denounce a business model, as Estes did, and an ideology, as Hawley did, without denouncing a technology as such. It is a tired and unhelpful cliché to say that “AI is just a tool,” but what we can say is that it is a technology we still (for now) have power to steer. And it is the task of politics to determine which way we want to steer it, and to display the iron will to hold that course. As Toscano outlined the dynamic, drawing on Karl Polanyi’s 1944 masterpiece, The Great Transformation, we are witnessing today a “double movement” of economic forces seeking to instrumentalize humanity and of social forces mobilizing spontaneously in defense of the family and the human person.

“The Trump administration,” he said, “must take action to incorporate into itself both sides of the double movement … and then must establish within the government vehicles for dialog where the two sides can productively interact and negotiate.”

Although the president’s Rose Garden dinner guest list may have made that look unlikely, a gathering of the White House’s AI in Education Task Force earlier that same day gave glimmers of hope. The presiding first lady, who this spring championed the TAKEITDOWN Act against the epidemic of AI deepfake pornography, spoke to the gathered tech executives in optimistic but guarded tones: “as leaders and parents, we must manage AI’s growth responsibly. During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would our own children—empowering but with watchful guidance.” Not quite right, perhaps—we must put the interests of our children far above those of AI, and recognize the threat that AI poses to them—but an important warning nonetheless. Conservatives will be closely watching the administration’s next moves for signs of a commitment to secure our human future in an age of AI.